A Bridge Between PAP and Accounts of Sex

Companion piece to this post

In expositing my favorite argument against homosexual activity, I tend to make a quick leap between an account of sexual activity and a theory of pleasure.  With these two in place, I conclude that homosexual activity is immoral.  I want to make explicit the connection between the theory of pleasure as perception (PAP) and accounts of sexual activity.  

In providing accounts of sexual activity, we are attempting to provide the underlying meaning and purpose of human sexual acts. For an account to be successful, it needs to adequately explain the various normative features that sex possesses.  I think it can be argued that only the one-body account succeeds. 

PAP holds that sexual pleasure, taken on its own, is not inherently valuable.  It’s only valuable insofar as it relates to the real underlying good of the pleasure or experience. Given PAP, sexual pleasure exists as a perception of some underlying good.  Once we've given a successful account of sex, we’ll have identified the underlying good that sexual pleasure is perceiving.  In the case of sexual acts that do not relate to the underlying good sexual activity, PAP holds that the agent is bringing about a pleasure or experience of having achieved such one body union without the underlying reality of it.  To do this is to deceive oneself into a false pleasure.  And it is morally wrong to deceive oneself in a matter as important as sex.

So the accounts of sexual activity are attempts to probe the underlying good of sexual experience or pleasure.  Human sexual experiences and pleasure exist for the sake of these underlying purposes.  The PAP theory is to argue that it’s wrong to induce such an experience absent its underlying good.  

(I think we should broaden PAP, perhaps dropping the “pleasure” bit. This broadening doesn't affect my main point. Still, I’ll continue to call this principle PAP.)

Does Christ have Two Minds?

I hold to the traditional Christological position known as Dyophysitism, the doctrine that Christ has two natures.  This was expressed in the Chalcedonian Definition and reaffirmed in the Third Council of Constantinople.  One rather recent development of this doctrine is the idea that Christ, while being just one person, possessed two minds - and while the traditional position doesn’t really (so far as I know) speak about Christ having two minds, but rather natures - I think that it’s still a natural development of the orthodox position.  I particularly like the development of the two-mind theory that Thomas Morris has provided.

I think that the two minds theory is required for the qua-type moves the orthodox must make in order to account for Jesus's duel omniscience and limited knowledge.

Murphy and Moral Law

A moral law expresses a governing relationship between two properties, P and Q.  It is not the law itself that governs P or Q.  Rather, a moral law is an expression of the governing relationship P has over Q, with P morally selecting Q to be performed. It is the governing relationship that’s central to moral law, not that a law itself governs.

On Natural Law, it is the good itself that fixes what is wrong, that calls the shot.  So it fulfills the role of P.  The goods generate the laws by selecting properties, and these selections of properties are what explains the wrongness of certain actions.  This makes Natural Law an axiologist theory: Value concepts are basic and deontic concepts are derivative.

Moral laws explain moral facts.  A moral fact is something like “Bob shouldn't disrespect the good.”  Moral laws are not moral facts.  For a moral law is an expression of a relationship between a property, “goodness,” selecting for other properties, “must be respected.” This explains the moral fact of why Bob should not disrespect the good.  So the good calls the shots, selecting the proper responses to it.  This relationship results in an expression of moral law.  And moral facts are then explained by the moral law.

Two Johns?

Our data is so weird.  Papias *may* refer to two Johns - but the evidence Eusebius uses to deduce this is weak and ambiguous.  Surely, if Papias were more clear elsewhere, Eusebius would have cited that instead.  

The John that Papias spoke of was termed “The Elder.”  That matches the epitaph of the shorter Johannine epistles.

But whoever wrote the Johannine epistles wrote the Gospel of John.

Papias was definitely familiar with the Gospel of John, as he lists the precise ordering of the apostles that John gives.  Papias probably also said something about the composition of John, as he did about the other gospels.  So it’s odd that Eusebius did not preserve what Papias said about the composition of John, unless Charles Hill is right to hold that Eusebius did, in fact, record it - but covertly, using Papias as an unnamed source.

But it strongly seems that whoever wrote the apocalypse did not write the rest of the Johannine literature.  But the rest of the Johannine literature is emphatic about eye-witness testimony.

Yet it looks like the teachings Papias was notorious for are based on the book of Revelation - namely, Papias’s chilaism.  

So we have two pieces of data pulling in opposite directions:  “The Elder” epitaph points Papias linking himself to the gospel and shorter letters.  The chiliasm links Papias to the book of Revelation.  But the book of Revelation and the other Johannine literature is hard to reconcile as the work of a single author.

Irenaeus, who was familiar with Papias’s book, believes that the author of the Johannine literature was the apostle John and has no hint of a two-John theory.

Justin Martyr is explicit that the apocalypse was written by the apostle John.

The Apocryphon of John, a gnostic work that predates Ireneaus, also attributes the book to the apostle John, explicitly the Son of Zebedee.

Further, I’m strongly moved by the idea that “elder” was a late usage term for the apostles:  Papias explicitly calls his list of apostles “the elders” and then calls John “the elder,” seemingly linking John with the preceding apostolic group. 

Some hold that the apostle John, son of Zebedee, came to hold sway in the Ephesian area but that Papias did not directly know him, but one of his disciples also known as John, who lived into the 2nd century.  Others, like Bauckham, hold that Papias’ mentor was indeed a different John but was still a disciple of Jesus, who wrote the gospel of John.

So despite this massively confusing evidence, I’m still heavily inclined towards the single author view of the Johannine literature, perhaps with John aided by an amanuensis for some of the literature (the gospel and shorter epistles? The apocalypse alone?).  

Charles Hill argues that Eusebius is covertly using Papias as a source in 3.24, and that this usage shows that there’s a second John - for if this is a Papias quote, then Papias is quoting the Elder, and the Elder is referring to John in the third person, so it must be a distinct John.  – Why couldn’t it just be Papias writing instead of directly quoting the elder? 

Two Hypotheses:  

First: Eusebius’s theory. Two Johns.  Elder John wrote the apocalypse and knew the apostle.  The apostle wrote the gospels and Johannine letters.  We have the Elder's testimony preserved in Papias via Eusebius 3.24 concerning the composition of the gospel by the apostle.

Second hypothesis:  One John, author of all of the Johannine literature.  Ireneaus seemed to think this.  

Justin Martyr lived in Ephesus for a time and explicitly claimed that the apocalypse was written by John the apostle and seemed also to think that the gospel was written by the apostle John.

Third hypothesis: Bauckman’s.  The apostle falls out of view and the gospel/Johannine epistles are instead composed by the Elder John, who was a disciple of Jesus and known to Papias.

The evidence for two Johns:

The monuments

The Dionysius stylistic argument

The Ambiguous Papias quote

Contra: Jerome claimed that the two monuments were just both dedicated to the single apostle.

Philipe of Side claims from a purported Papias fragment that John son of Zebedee was martyred “by Jews,” explicitly linking this to Jesus' prophecy concerning the two brothers James and John.  So John died early, and couldn't have written the gospel. 

Contra:  John son of Zebedee certainly didn't die with John in 44 A.D., given that Paul mentions him as a pillar of the church circa 50 A.D.  

And Philip of Sides also claims in the De Boor fragments that a person died as a martyr that certainly did not - namely, Pierius.  Jerome is clear that Pierius didn’t die as a martyr despite the claim of Philip of Side.

Also, why wouldn’t Eusebius have mentioned this from Papias if he had it in front of him?  Luke Stevens uses this to argue that Eusebius didn’t know Papias first hand, but that seems wrong, for Eusebius claims Papias as “extant.”

Thoughts on the Origin of the Synoptic Gospels

I hold rather strongly to the Markan priority thesis.  I’m also convinced by Ehrman’s argument for the Q source based on the varying ordering of the purported Q-material in Matthew and Luke.  

I also find myself accepting the idea that Mark was likely written around 66 A.D. at the diction of Peter in Rome.  I know Bauckman has adduced some evidence for Peter’s direct involvement in the form of suggested literary device that betrays the diction Mark received, but I don’t know how moved I am by this evidence.  I think that the mention of Simon of Cyrene’s children also points to a Roman origin.  Mark used “Latinisms,” or Latin phrases that explained some Greek terms.  Church tradition supports these data points.  I’m also moved by the idea that Mark would be an unlikely candidate to be randomly claimed as an author unless there was some strong reason to think that he did, in fact, write the gospel.  There’s good evidence from Paul’s later epistles and 1 Peter that Mark would have been in Rome at the appropriate time.  And, as adduced by Dan Wallace, there seems to be a slight hint in Acts that John Mark was an “assistant,” which gives connotations of one who keeps and maintains records.

But taking Markan priority together with an approximate date of 66 A.D. leads to some problems.  It would lead, if taken in a straightforward way, to dating Luke-Acts and Matthew to sometime in the 70s and 80s.  Most scholars are fine with this result, but I’m not sure.  There are some decent reasons to believe that Luke-Acts was written in 62 A.D., such as Luke neglecting to mention Paul’s death.  Further, Paul seems to quote a unique passage from Luke’s gospel, suggesting that Luke’s gospel may have existed even earlier.

Of course, we can posit that these various texts existed in preliminary and draft stages.  Some of these stages may well have been oral, and that may lay behind Paul’s quoting of Luke.  I’m not sure.  And perhaps Luke used a proto-Mark as a source.  There is, after all, the Great Omission in which Luke skips a significant chunk of Mark.  Perhaps he does this because he only had a draft version of Mark, what scholars have termed Ur-Markus. But most doubt this theory - so that whatever form of the Gospel of Mark used by Matthew and Luke, it must have been complete or virtually so.  So it looks like we’re back in the 70s or 80s.

So I’m just not sure.  Still, I find myself accepting the traditional story and authorship concerning the composition of Mark and of Luke.  Matthew is a bit harder for me to swallow.  First - Matthew would have been quite old if his gospel was written after 70 A.D.  It’s possible that he lived this long and wrote the book at that point, but it seems to diminish the probability.  Second, the main tradition claiming Mathew’s authorship is clouded by the weirdness of the Papias quote: In Hebrew? Logia, or sayings?  That just isn’t Matthew’s gospel.  I once thought that Papias may be referring to Q, but Q was written in Greek - so probably not.  Third, why would an apostle not contribute more original material? Why depend upon Mark’s gospel?  Fourth, there seems to be more accretions in Matthew's Gospel (the rising of the saints, the guards at the tomb).  Fifth, there are little phrases that seem to indicate a greater passage of time ("to this day").   

So now I’m more inclined to think that Matthew originated from a community affiliated with that apostle, and that the unique material does stem from the apostle Matthew - and, perhaps, some of the edits that seem to point towards Matthew (Levi being rendered as Matthew; “the house” instead of “Levi’s house”, the excessive interest in taxation and proper nomenclature for currency) may have been made at the behest of the apostle.  I do believe these pieces of evidence are suggestive of Matthew’s authorship, or at least his standing behind those particular pieces of the gospel or its tradition.

So I accept traditional authorship for Mark, Luke (and John), but I fudge a bit on Matthew’s. Matthew is most likely behind the gospel that bears his name in *some* way, both due to the unique calling of Matthew, the claims of the early church, the book being affiliated with such an otherwise obscure apostle, the title of the book itself, and the unique material that seems to point towards a tax collector.  But honestly, I'm not satisfied with this.  I don't know if this hypothesis of Matthew "standing behind" the gospel can really explain these slight edits in a satisfying way, even granting that these slight edits point towards Matthew.

The old suggestion that, among the Twelve, it would be Matthew the tax-collector who would most likely, owing to his profession, be able to write might after all be a sound guess and a clue to the perplexing question of the role he might have played somewhere among the sources of the Gospel of Matthew.  - Richard Bauckham

A Hermeneutical Rule of Thumb

There are fantastic events and figures in the Bible.  The authors intended some of these to be historic and others figurative.  Jesus being a “door” is figurative.  The resurrection is historical.  Balaam's ass spoke.  The talking snake in the garden is symbolic.   We need a principled way to classify these elements correctly.  In some cases, the narrative tells us outright that it's symbolic.  Sometimes common-sense can decide.  Other times, it's more vague.  

Here's a rule of thumb that correctly classifies each item on the above list.  If some event or figure is fantastic, then we should take it to be historical if:   The narrative includes (a) surprise and wonder on the part of the audience or narrator and (b) the event is ascribed to a supernatural being. Balaam's ass meets both criteria, so we should take it to be historical.  The snake does not.  The snake is not described as being possessed by Satan or miraculously enabled to speak by God. Instead, the narrative goes out of its way to describe the snake as a mere beast: "now the snake was the most cunning animal that God has made," and cursed to crawl on the ground. Neither does its speaking surprise the characters or narrator, despite the fantastical nature of a snake speaking.  So we should take the snake to be non-historical.  The resurrection, on the other hand, satisfies both criteria - it's both immensely surprising and ascribed to God, so classifies as historical.  This rubric correctly classifies the items.

Why think these criteria are true, though? Well, first - miraculously fantastic things do not happen naturally. So if the narrative describes some fantastic thing happening naturally, then there's a problem if it's taken literally, a problem the author would have recognized. For the second condition, miracles are fantastic things and are unexpected. If the narrative doesn't contemplate the audience or narrator being surprised, if a fantastic thing is just passed by, then we have a clue that it’s meant figuratively. Think of the "door" statement. If upon hearing that Jesus called himself a door, the audience burst into surprise and wonderment about the Jesus/door hybrid before them, then we'd have some evidence that the narrative meant it literally. But since it's passed by as an unremarkable comment, we know it's a figurative statement. Contrast this to the "I am the bread" statement by Jesus in John 6.  The audience did react with surprise (and disgust), providing some evidence that Jesus meant the statement in a literal way.  

Notice that the trees of Genesis would also classify as figurative using these criteria. For their ability to confer knowledge and eternal life is something that they seem to possess inherently, and not because God happens to grant eternal life on the occasion of eating the fruit. Their ability even seems to work contrary to God's will, necessitating God to set up a guard to prevent mankind from eating them after the fall. So they're figurative as well. 

There are, of course, other criteria that help determine whether an author meant an event historically or not.  This rule of thumb isn’t an infallible criteria, either.  Just a suggestive guide.  Comparative literature analysis, genre analysis, and so on are additional tools that can help settle the question of whether a text is figurative or not.

On the Wrong of Masturbation

Taken from Pruss, but substituted in "masturbation."  I think the argument works.

1. Each kind of deeply humanly significant pleasure is a way of affectively relating to an independent deeply humanly significant kind of good in which the pleasure is taken. (Premise)
2. There is no deeply humanly significant good in masturbation when the person takes no pleasure in the activity. (Premise)
3. Climactic sexual pleasure is deeply humanly significant. (Premise)
4. Climactic sexual pleasure is a pleasure taken in sexual activity. (Premise)
5. If a kind P of pleasure is a way of affectively relating to an independent kind G of good, and an instance of P fails in this way to relate to an existent instance of G, then that instance is empty. (Definition)
6. It is wrong to deliberately induce an instance of a deeply humanly significant kind of pleasure when that instance is empty. (Premise)
7. If there would be no deeply humanly significant good in an activity were the activity done pleasurelessly, then the activity fails to realize an instance of an independently deeply humanly significant kind of good. (Premise)
8. Therefore, masturbation fails to realize an instance of an independently deeply humanly significant kind of good. (By 2 and 7)
9. Therefore, taking climactic sexual pleasure in sexual activity is empty in masturbation. (By 1, 5 and 8)
10. Therefore, climactic sexual pleasure in masturbation is empty. (By 4 and 9)
11. It is wrong to deliberately induce climactic sexual pleasure in masturbation. (By 3, 6 and 10)

We can ask whether the person who has foregone masturbating has “missed out” on anything.  And it seems not.  He doesn’t seem worse off for it.  And this is because masturbation is an empty pleasure without any underlying good.

Unnatural sexual acts (coitus interruptus, masturbation, homosexual acts, bestiality, etc.) do not contain any union on a biological level; there is no common striving of a united organism on the biophysiological level for an end.  It is worth noting that all these acts are basically the same. E.g., homosexual acts are essentially equivalent to two persons cooperating in masturbation. Thus, on a natural law level, if any one of these acts is wrong, it follows that all the others are wrong as well, since the distinctions between them are accidental from a moral point of view.

A Brief Excurses on Gender

Time for a controversial post.  

In his paper on the gender/sex distinction, Bogardus argues that our traditional English words “man” and “woman” resist analysis as purely gender terms.  They are best taken as partly denoting biological sex.  Still, Bogardus grants - as he must - that a word with a stipulated definition like “gender,” can refer purely to the social features commonly associated with the biological sexes.  Stipulated definitions cannot be argued against.  

I want to go a tad further.  While I grant that one can make a conceptual distinction between sex and gender, I think it’s the case that our biological sex normatively selects for certain behaviors and activities that will result in particular gender roles for the respective sexes.  Here are some examples:  I think that sexual activity between members of the same sex is immoral.  So there should be social ways to signal to others to which sex one belongs.  I think that contraception is morally wrong and that married couples need a grave reason to refrain from procreation.  So pregnancy and child rearing should be common, which will of course select females for particular social roles that differentiate them from males - pregnancy, breast-feeding, early child-mother bonding. This results in men having to fulfill other alternative roles.  Further, and more controversially, I think that Christians have divinely imposed gender norms that we must heed:  No female pastors (though God does inspire female prophets!).  

Notice that I don’t really care about the more frivolous gender norms - leg shaving, make-up, dresses, and whathaveyou.  While our biology may incline us towards certain behaviors in these spheres, I doubt that it’s normatively selecting these behaviors as with the other cases in the above paragraph.  

Hume's Law

I think I’ve finally settled on a position in regard to Hume’s Law.  There is a version of it that is true, but it has much less import than many philosophers seem to think.  The version that I affirm is weak.  It can’t do the work that many wish it to do - it can’t be used to support non-cognitivism, nor the fact-value distinction, at least insofar as that distinction tries to banish values from the realm of fact.

I think, along with Pigden, that Hume’s Law is an instance of the more general logical principle that one cannot “get out” of a conclusion what one has not put into the premises.  If there is no normative content in a premise, then the conclusion will have no normative import.  

So yes, one can indeed not move from purely descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. This requires the natural lawyer to employ the use of Bridge Principles, to move between descriptions of what constitutes human flourishing to normative claims that we ought to support human flourishing.  Murphy’s Real Identity Thesis and Oderberg’s belief that nature has built-in normativity or values are examples of such bridge principles.  The New Natural Lawyers tend to affirm Hume’s Law.  Robert P. George and Patrick Lee both affirm it, for instance. Plus Mark Murphy’s use of the Real Identity Thesis seems predicated on the truth of this version of Hume’s Law and seems to be offered as a bridge principle to cross the fork. 

But there’s a stronger version of Hume’s Law, one that many believe supports non-cognitivism, banishing values and normativity from the realm of fact entirely.  The philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau provides a relatively common formulation:  

When we describe the world, we talk about what is the case.  But morality speaks of what ought to be the case.  How can we get from descriptions to prescriptions?  How does knowing how the world actually works enable us to learn how it ought to work?  Hume thought that there was no answer to this question.  If he is right, there is a gap between what is and what ought to be, a gap that can never be crossed.

So we can distinguish two versions of Hume’s Law:

Weak Version:  You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from purely descriptive premises.

Strong Version: You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from any descriptive premises.

The Strong Version seems to be false.  Here’s a counter-example to it:  “There is an obligation.”  This is a descriptive statement, for it’s describing what there is.  And from this descriptive statement, I can infer that I ought to do something. So, contra Hume’s Law as described by Shafer-Landau, we can indeed move between ‘knowing how the world works’ to ‘how it ought to work.’ So I can indeed derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’  And here’s the thing:  If moral realism is right, then something like this descriptive statement is true.  If there are no statements like this that are true, then moral realism is false.

Again, if the Strong Version of Hume’s Law is right, then you cannot derive an ought from any descriptive premise, including the one just given.  But that seems clearly false with this example.  Why? Due to normative entanglement.  Though the statement is descriptive, it contains a normative element.  And since the normative element has been “put in,” you can get it out with the conclusion.